The Enchantress (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel)

millennia, she’d come close on more than one occasion. Her only regret was that she would not be able to see her sister again. Aoife had sacrificed her life to keep the appalling Coatlicue from this Shadowrealm and from Scathach. And now Aoife was trapped in Coatlicue’s lightless world, doomed to an eternity of suffering unless she was rescued. Yet who would rescue her? Who would be foolhardy—or brave—enough to venture into Coatlicue’s realm? Scathach had sworn that she would rescue her sister, and now it looked like she would not be able to keep that promise.
    “Uncle, you don’t seem too concerned about our imminent death,” she said to Prometheus.
    “For the final time, girl, I am not your uncle,” the red-haired Elder snapped.
    “Not yet,” the Shadow snapped back. “But for the hundredth time, you will be. Now—are we going to crash and die?”
    “Crash, yes. Die? Maybe. It depends on whether my calculations were correct.”
    Scathach pushed herself from her seat and staggered to a cracked porthole.
    They were racing directly toward a forest. Scathach shook her head. That was not possible. They had risen too high, and hadn’t fallen far enough or long enough—how could there be trees so close?
    Not trees, she suddenly realized.
A
tree—just one. They were falling into the side of a single tree.
    Scathach flung herself across the cabin, bouncing off the walls, to peer through another and then another porthole. The tree was massive. Huge and twisting, it loomed before them like a vast green wall. She craned her neck, looking up and down. The trunk disappeared into the forest canopy far below, and the top of the tree soared up through the clouds, reaching high into the heavens. She was only looking at a tiny section of it, but that portion was enormous.
    “Yggdrasill,” she breathed.
    “The One Tree,” Prometheus confirmed.
    “The original Yggdrasill of Danu Talis,” Scathach said in awe.
    “The original? It is the only one of its kind.”
    Scathach opened her mouth to respond but then closed it again and said nothing. She had seen Yggdrasill before. But the tree she had seen in a Shadowrealm bordering Mill Valley—though it was massive—had been puny compared to this. And then Dee had destroyed it.
    “You should sit,” Prometheus commanded. “Now!”
    The Shadow fell back into her seat and held on to the damaged armrests. Everyone could see the tree approaching. The light filtering in through the portholes of the Rukma vimana had turned dark and green, and it looked as if the craft was falling into a forest, but they were actually descending at an angle into the side of the Yggdrasill.
    “Brace yourselves!” Prometheus shouted as branches started to scrape and tear along the side of the craft.
    And then they hit the massive trunk of the World Tree.
    The vimana split in two.
    A huge crack ripped through the craft, and the front half of the ship with Prometheus and Scathach pitched forward and lodged safely in a network of thick vines and enormous branches. Leaves rained down on top of them. The back half of the craft, holding Joan, Saint-Germain, Will and Palamedes caught on a series of branches, which bent beneath its weight, then broke and dropped the ship onto a street-sized branch twenty feet below. The ship tottered there for a moment; then the branch cracked and dipped. A second crack sent splinters shooting upward. Beneath the branch there was nothing but an endless fall into clouds far below.
    Scathach crawled out of the craft, grabbed a length of vine and quickly fashioned a long rope. Tying the rope around the branch she was lying on, she lowered it into the body of the craft beneath her.
    Prometheus tugged off his metal gloves with his teeth, wrapped a second length of the vine around his waist and dropped it into the back half of the craft directly below, almost into the Saracen Knight’s hands.
    “Quickly, quickly!” Scathach screamed. She could see that the branch the vimana was balanced on was about to snap.
    Bruised and bloodied from a cut high on his forehead, Saint-Germain lifted an unconscious Joan out of her seat and slipped her over his shoulder. Gripping Scathach’s vine in one hand, then entwining it around his feet, he hauled himself upward with a grunt. Scathach dug in her feet and pulled, teeth gritted, muscles straining.
    Palamedes lifted a trembling Will Shakespeare and held him while he wrapped Prometheus’s vine around him, tying it off in a